ICAI follow-up review of 2017-18 reports

Outstanding issues

We identified three outstanding issues in our 2017-18 follow-up that we returned to in the next follow up exercise:

• GCRF: While we saw many improvements at this fund, we returned to the GCRF to assess: (i) the role of BEIS in providing overall accountability and responsibility in managing and assuring the GCRF, (ii) the block grants that are still being forwarded to the devolved funding councils via the GCRF, (iii) progress on the research hubs as they develop, in order to assess the effectiveness of this highly decentralised delivery model, and (iv) the effectiveness of the SCOR Board in influencing the allocation and delivery of aid-funded research and innovation programmes over time.
• Governance: We recognised that our follow-up took place too soon after publication, and we therefore returned to assess progress on all the recommendations in the next year’s follow-up.
• Irregular migration: Overall, we found good progress on the outstanding issues we raised in last year’s follow-up. However, DFID has decided not go ahead with plans for an independent evaluation of its flagship migration-related programme, the SSS II, relying instead on alternative arrangements for monitoring, rapid research and learning. Because this happened subsequent to our follow up assessment, we planned to review these revised arrangements as part of next year’s follow-up.

Updates on these outstanding issues were published in our 2018-19 follow-up review.